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Archives for February 2003
Elementary My Dear Watson
There were some wonderful quotes in the news today, attributed to James Watson, who, along with Francis Crick, discovered DNA 50 years ago:
If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease…The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what’s the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, “Well, poverty, things like that.” It probably isn’t. So I’d like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent.
And my personal favorite sound bite:
People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.
Can’t Wait Much Longer
This screenshot of a Mac OS X System Preferences panel for TiVo file sharing has been making the rounds.
When Home Media Option debuts, it’s going to kick some serious ass. I just hope I’ll be able to access my iTunes playlists from the TiVo.
It’s You I Like
Mister Rogers passed away today at the age of 74 from stomach cancer.
I’m left speechless by the news.
I can’t think of another celebrity or stranger whose passing could possibly do this to me. There’s a flood of happy childhood memories that have hit me like a brick.
I don’t want to go to work today. I want to take a trip on a trolley to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe and visit Henrietta Pussycat, or see how crayons are made, or sing “You Are Special.” I want to remember Mister Rogers and how he made a difference.
Is Barlow Right?
This piece argues that the administration’s foreign policy may actually be a bit more calculating and well-intentioned than we might have thought. It’s well worth the read and I’m sure the piece is likely to spawn some interesting discussion in libertarian circles.
It’s attributed to John Perry Barlow, but I can’t seem to find it on either the EFF site, Barlow’s personal site, or any other reputable news or public policy site. It looks like it was scanned and converted to text with OCR software so it might have originally been published in print. If anyone knows where it came from, please let me know.
Could Be Better Than Best
It looks like Christopher Guest has a new movie coming out on April 16th. The trailer is online and it looks like it could actually be better than Best in Show.
The film documents three fictitious folk bands coming together for a tribute concert for their deceased manager.
The best part is that one of the bands is composed of all of the members from Spinal Tap.
Defending My Yonic Houseplant
My cousin and his girlfriend came to visit DC last week and they stayed with us. A few days after they left, an absolutely beautiful white orchid arrived as a gift.
Over the last few days my cats have begun to show signs of jealousy. They are obviously quite bothered by the attention the orchid has been receiving. They also seem acutely aware that the orchid must have cost more than their own Washington Humane Society adoption fees.
This is a personal affront to them. I’ve begun to notice that they seem to be plotting against the orchid a la Wile E. Coyote. You can see it in their eyes.
I will defend this plant. I stand resolute, patiently waiting to administer negative reinforcement (spray bottle of water) whenever the cats violate the three-foot radial DMZ surrounding the flower.
We shall prevail.
So Sue Us
Whenever I read about something like this, I am completely unable to imagine what school administrators might have been thinking. It’ll take about five minutes for the ACLU to get involved.
I wonder how much the kid will get as a settlement.
*[ACLU]: American Civil Liberties Union
The Lion Sleeps Tonight
Sorry to inflict pet photos on you all, but I couldn’t resist posting this picture my wife took of Basie sleeping a few weeks ago.
Do They Test for Drugs?
The following job ad ran in Sunday’s New York Times:
HIGH TIMES seeks an editor w/5+ yrs
consumer mag exp to help establish a
fresh editorial direction. Knowl of the
subject matter essential. Cover ltr &
res to: jobs@hightimes.com
Several questions naturally follow:
- Exactly what do they mean by “fresh editorial direction?”
- How do I make sure the ad isn’t some form of police entrapment?
- Do they test for drugs? Is passing really failing?
- Should I use my “Steal Your Face” letterhead for the cover letter?
- Should I list my experience with Martha Stewart Living on my resume?
Burn On Demand
The New York Times has a fascinating article on how Smithsonian Folkways is using CD-Rs to insure that recordings from their entire catalog are always available.
I’d rather have reasonably priced downloads of SHN files, but this still seems like a good first step and I really hope the major label players will take the hint.
Radley on the United Nations
Radley has an excellent post on the United Nations.
Like the Pine Trees Lining the Winding Road
I’ve got a name.
And it actually used to be a pretty conmmon one. The Social Security administration keeps an online database tracking the popularity of baby names over time. It is currently only fully searchable from 1991 to the present, but other general information is available by decade going back to the 1880’s.
In the ten years between 1991 and 2001 my first name (Patrick) slipped from being the 36th most popular name for a male baby to the 73rd most popular name. To make matters worse, some really strange names have been climbing the list at an alarming rate. It seems that Caleb, Hunter, Logan, Mason and Devin are all ranked higher than Patrick.
It’s All About Presentation
Jane Galt has a good post today about flowers and Valentine’s day. As she properly notes, it’s all about the presentation:
While red roses are, of course, romantic, the way women want those is the way they’ve seen them in a movie–a couple dozen long stemmed, completely impossible to deal with red roses that show up in a white box with a ribbon on them.
I sent roses to my wife yesterday. I clearly indicated that I wanted them to arrive boxed, as I always do. It’s a relatively simple request that I can’t imagine is uncommon, yet the florist still managed to screw it up.
They were delivered in a plastic cone.
Bloggers on the Syllabus
It seems that our friend Julian Sanchez made the elite cut of recommended blogs for a University of Texas class on Information in Cyberspace.
It also looks like he’s in pretty good company.
Why Use Radio?
With client applications like Kung-Log available for Movable Type, why do people still use Radio?
Implementing Textile on Old Posts
It was easy enough to implement Textile formatting on old Movable Type posts when using MySQL. All I had to do was run the following SQL command and then republish all posts:
UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_convert_breaks = "textile_1" WHERE entry_blog_id = "12";
You would obviously want to substitute the appropriate blog ID in the above statement.
I did notice one strange bug with the plugin. Text surrouned by a single dash is formatted as striked text. This creates a problem with SmartyPants, which converts two hyphens to an em dash. The result is that any block of text with two em dashes is rendered as striked text. They probably should have used a character other than the hyphen for implementing that particular inline formatting shortcut.
Movable Type 2.6
Movable Type 2.6 was released this morning. I already went ahead and ran the upgrade on my server and I’m quite pleased.
There are quite a few new features in this release. My personal favorite is support for multiple text-formatting options, based on plugins. Brad Choate has already written an excellent plugin that allows Movable Type to use Dean Allen’s Textile text formatting system.
As if all this wasn’t enough, Choate’s plugin also invokes SmartyPants (if it happens to be installed) which will automatically convert your quotes to “smart quotes.”
Very cool–and it also converts two consecutive hyphens to an em dash.
The Biomechanical Peter Pan Construct
“Selections from My Name is Blanket” is quite possibly the funniest thing I have ever read. It’s a series of excerpts from the fictional memoirs of Michael Jackson’s son, as published in 2046:
My father Michael wanted to protect us, to give us inauspicious, normal lives free of the media spotlight. He accomplished this: by allowing documentary filmmakers to record our childhoods, by dressing us in feathered Mardi Gras masks and gauze when we left the ranch, and by dangling me out of a window with a towel on my head. In retrospect, the logic of his parenting was ambiguous at best. Nonetheless, I had my own giraffe.
Can Moore Win?
The Academy Award nominations have been released. I actually don’t like awards shows. I think they’re self-indulgent and gratuitous. But I’ve always been intrigued by how the selection of winners reflects the psychology of the voting body.
The “Best Documentary Feature” award is usually pretty easy to predict, even if you haven’t seen the films. Historically, the holocaust film usually has the best odds. Four of the last seven winners were such films.
But Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine is definitely the front-runner this year. A poll the International Documentary Association conducted of 2000 filmmakers even named Bowling for Columbine the “best documentary of all time.”
I still can’t realistically imagine the Academy giving the award to Moore, given his frequent vocal criticism of Israel. That’s why I think Prisoner of Paradise will win. It’s a film about a German Jew “forced to write and direct a Nazi propaganda film while being held prisoner in a concentration camp.”
Did I Mention I Love Cafepress?
Your official source for Total Information Awareness gear™
The bib is pretty damn creepy.
